For food lovers like myself, Penang is a heaven on Earth, a prandial theme park. It took me approximately three meals after my arrival here to acknowledge, quietly and to myself at first, that this little island off the coast of Malaysia probably offers the greatest food in Southeast Asia. Ten meals later, and a little more vocally, I announced that Penang’s food topped my personal list of worldly culinary delights. And hundreds of plates in, I can only use superlatives to describe my affection. Now, like almost every Penangite I know, I, too, feel the surge of anger rise in my throat when somebody tries to tell me that the char kuey teow (noodles fried in chili paste with bean...

When Nikki Kaya was a teenager in Turkey, she didn’t want to go with her parents to their party on New Year’s Eve. And since they wouldn’t let her hang out with her friends, she opted for her grandmother’s house. Why? The hummus, of course.

Kaya says that on every holiday, Grandma Lale would cover her big wooden table with bowls of hummus, as well as fava bean spread, olives, feta cheese, lamb, rice, yogurt dip, baba ghanoush, pinto-bean salad and sweets. But it was the hummus that kept Kaya coming back. “On one hand, I thought about my friends having so much fun,” she says, “but on the other, there was that hummus!”

Monticello, New Mexico, home to fewer than 100 people, was founded in the mid-1900s and is nestled in a canyon at the end of NM 142—25 miles northwest of Truth or Consequences and 160 miles south of Albuquerque. The area lies within the northern Chihuahuan Desert, and the highway winds first through a plateau of lechuguilla, creosote bush and ocotillo, and then continues downward into Cañada Alamosa, named for the cottonwood trees that long ago took root near Alamosa Creek. Here, cattle roam freely, horses graze in paddocks, alfalfa grows in small, diked plots and old adobe homes alternate between more recent framed houses and a handful of trailer homes.